Fig. 4.

Best candidate genes for mating process and reproductive activation. Patterns of expression for 15 genes that were significantly differentially expressed in our study and in Kocher et al. [22] and Kocher et al. [31] (see Additional file 7). The table shows the total read counts for each gene in virgin, mated and CO₂-treated queens from our study plus the direction of expression in mated vs. virgin queens in the other two studies: UP = up-regulated in mated queens; DOWN = down-regulated; bold red = same pattern of expression between studies; n/a = difference in gene expression occurs in a comparison which is not relevant for our study